Innate Bias Makes Women Look Like Men

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Quick, is that figure approaching in a dark alley a man or a
woman? Your eyes could lead you astray, new research finds.

People are
intrinsically biased to assume that an ambiguous silhouette
is male rather than female, the new study finds. Though the
reason for this bias isn't clear, it could be a protective
mechanism — men, who tend to be stronger and more aggressive on
the whole, present a greater threat than women.

In other words, said study researcher Kerri Johnson, a
psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, the
brain may be taking a "better safe than sorry" approach.

"If you're walking down a dark alley at night and you encounter a
man he probably has the capability of
doing you harm," Johnson told LiveScience. "But if you
encounter a woman she might not have the physical strength to
exert any influence of that sort."

Snap judgments

Humans are hardwired to make certain social judgments, according
to Johnson. We register age, race and sex without even trying,
for example. And in the real world, we're usually right.

But presenting ambiguous bodies can challenge our snap judgments.
Johnson and her colleagues used real-world measurements of
thousands of Army recruits to determine the waist-to-hip ratios
of men and women. Women have a real average ratio of about 0.72
and men about 0.89 (the smaller the number, the more extreme the
curves). Below a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.80, the figure is more
likely to be female; above that number, the figure is more likely
to be male.

But when presented with silhouettes based on these waist-to-hip
ratios, participants misjudged them wildly, assuming many more
were male than actually were. [ 5
Myths About Women's Bodies ]

"Bodies that we knew to be exclusive to women were nevertheless,
by our participants, perceived to be men," Johnson said.

In a second study, the researchers showed participants a line of
body silhouettes and asked them to pick out the average male and
average female figure. Again, people exhibited a bias toward
identifying more female figures as male. In fact, the figure
picked as the average "average woman" was a body shape more
curvaceous than is actually physically possibly. In a third
study, they presented neutral bodies obscured by random patterns
and asked participants to pick which were women; that study, too,
revealed a bias toward assuming femalelike bodies were male.

Self-protection?

Finally, the researchers set our to test their theory that the
bias arises from a self-protection strategy. Again, they showed
participants body silhouettes, but this time they had
participants watch a video to induce either fear (a horror clip),
positive emotions (a comic clip) or sadness (a clip of a boy
learning of his father's death). A fourth group of participants
saw a video of geometric patterns, meant to elicit no emotion.

The results revealed that participants triggered to feel fear
were more likely than the happy or sad participants to judge a
body to be male.

What that means is that the bias is dependent on emotional state,
suggesting it does arise from a possible threat, Johnson said.

The effects of the bias could be wide-ranging. For example,
Johnson said, studies on attractiveness find that people prefer
curvaceous female bodies, especially when the participants
have been exposed to Western media. The "extreme" mental image
people have for a "normal" woman may influence how people
judge real-life women, and themselves, Johnson said.

The researchers report their work today (Oct. 16) in the journal
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.